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Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Tablecloth Redesign

My family room has a problem: it has way too much brown. Not that there's anything wrong with brown, but when almost every piece of furniture in a room is the same chocolaty shade, the room can be a little boring. But I never intended the room to end up this way. My husband and I bought the couch, and when we moved into our home, we didn't have enough furniture (or the funds) to fill our home. But we have a generous family who gave us many of their unwanted used furniture pieces so that we could have places to sit and eat and sleep. Here we are three years later and not much has changed. So I decided to begin by making a table runner for the library table behind the couch in an effort to break up the brown.

Several years ago I picked up a table cloth at Goodwill and it never fit any of the tables we ever owned. I just thought it was pretty...

I mean, seriously! Someone took the time to cross stitch this thing by hand!

I finally decided it was time to use this beautiful little creation. Now that I'm a sewing star and all (I've only sewn three things in my life and two of them were paper garlands), I thought I could cut the table cloth down into a table runner. So I measured it and marked it...

and cut it down to the size I wanted, leaving an inch extra on each side for seam allowance. Then I pressed and pinned the edge to form a half-inch seam before running it through my sewing machine.

And that was it. Now my library table isn't a brown void behind my couch.

And I like the needle work against the table's carved details.

Now I'll have to address my lack of decorative "stuff" on the table. Maybe I can head back to Goodwill and find more treasures!